Microsoft Looks To Enhanced Sitelinks To Boost Click-Through Rates

A handful of U.S. brands that have been piloting Bing Ads Enhanced Sitelinks for the past several months have experienced click-through rate increases between 27% and 68%, per Microsoft. The new format allows advertisers to add up to two lines of custom text that will appear under the company's name in search query results.

The feature, which launched Monday to U.S. advertisers, will become available to marketers in some international markets before the year's end. The format creates more relevant, descriptive and easy to read advertisements in search engine query results. Google has launched something similar within the past couple of years.

Eliot Li, program manager of Bing Ads Platform at Microsoft, walks through the steps involved in using Enhanced Sitelinks -- such as clicking on the sitelink to add a description and choosing the device preference by checking the Mobile box. 

"Bing Ads will give preference to those Sitelinks in mobile devices," Li writes. "Note that Enhanced Sitelinks is currently not supported in mobile devices. You can select the Mobile preference without entering Sitelink descriptions."

Bing Ads released Dynamic Sitelinks, which creates annotations for ads that have not set up sitelink extensions, earlier this month. The feature provides another way for potential customers to evaluate what the site has to offer prior to clicking on the link. It aims to reduce the cost of accompanying paid-search ads, while increasing click-through rates from organic listings by up to 14%. The option will not appear when marketers have enabled sitelink extensions.

Li said Microsoft continues to experiment with how to optimize the user experience for Enhanced Sitelinks across the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN).  "A portion of the network has not yet been enabled for Enhanced Sitelinks until we have determined the optimal user experience," he explains. "We expect most of the U.S. traffic in YBN will be enabled to serve Enhanced Sitelinks in the coming weeks."

 

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